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On this side right here you have you see some cold options, but also some hot food in there as well. We're in the back of a wonder in New York City. It's a food hall where more than 700 meal options across 30 different restaurant concepts can be prepared in one location. This automated machine is part of the equation. Wanda acquired its maker Spice in late 2025 for $186 million. The "Infinite Makeline" is really just the beginning of what we're creating here at wonder. The infinite make line technology can prepare up to 500 bowls per hour, using 68 different ingredients, and wonder plans to expand the technology beyond
entrees, sauces and beverages are next. Given our aspiration to not only have six restaurants in here in the future, having hundreds, if not thousands of restaurants operating out of this single machine, we need a machine that's capable of dealing with all that complexity. Wonder wants to revolutionize the dining experience. It's piloting programs like drone delivery and having an AI assistant plan meals, but it also wants to shake up food accessibility in rural areas where food options are limited. The company has raised more than $3 billion from investors like Google and Nestle, and is heading towards an IPO. What we've seen in this company is many chapters of iteration to de-risk the business and to expand the upside of how big this could be.
After selling jet.com to Walmart for more than $3 billion and diapers.com to Amazon for $545 million, serial tech entrepreneur Marc Lore founded wonder in 2018. The initial concept was food trucks that would drive to homes and cook meals for customers, but the trucks were hard to get right. So the company pivoted and started making acquisitions. Blue apron for $103 million. Grubhub for $650 million. The latest are three New York City restaurants for undisclosed amounts. It also shifted to brick and mortar. Now it bills itself as a food hall and food delivery hybrid.
Order for a Raphael. 30 restaurants prepared in a 2500 square foot kitchen. Some menu items are inspired by restaurants with large followings or celebrity chefs. Prices range from $10 to $40. But wonder doesn't call itself a ghost kitchen. We own the delivery. We own the cooking. We own the restaurants. We have a physical brick and mortar, and we have our own app. So that's very different than a ghost kitchen. Wonder is a vertically integrated food technology platform to make great food more accessible.
Here's how it works. Sources, proteins and food prep are made and portioned in a central kitchen, then shipped to local stores where staff reheat and prepare food using just a few pieces of equipment high speed ovens, water baths and automated fryers. There are no gas or open flames. Everything is electric. Kitchens are staffed by upwards of 15 people during peak hours. The goal is to deliver meals within 30 minutes, and the company says prices are around 20 to 30% lower than other delivery platforms.
It also has no delivery fees. The company now operates 170 food halls across ten East Coast states. Two stores are open per week and its footprint has more than quadrupled in two years. Texas is next, with more than 100 locations planned there by the end of 2027. A lot of those places that we're in today have no fast casual at all, and we're bringing a fast casual Mexican and a great salad concept and a fast casual Greek and a fast casual burger and much higher quality food than is accessible there today. Wonders customer retention rate isn't as high as, say, Cava or Chipotle, who have been around for years, but its lifetime value, or the sum of what a customer has
spent there over time is higher than other bowl concepts. People that try us the first time come back for a second time. I think multi restaurant ordering is a big unlock. So the fact that a family, everyone in the family could order from a different restaurant. It all gets cooked, prepared and delivered together at a price point that is very challenging for anyone else to replicate. Investors recently are more selective about the concepts they fund in a high interest rate environment. They want to see faster returns and a path to profitability. Yet wonder has investors on board. After five funding rounds,
the company is valued at more than $9 billion. The opportunity is enormous at a unit level. The economics are so good that then it makes sense to continue to invest over time. And that's why big investing firms like NEA XL, GV forerunner, all of these big firms are all really excited to continue to invest. A lot of that has to do with wonders automation. Lori says the infinite make line will reduce labor costs by 20%, and enable each location to. Handle up to $14 million in annual order volume. Grubhub, I say put them on the map. But long term, I think if they can make the robotic kitchen stuff work, that's going to end up being the bigger piece.
Wander is launching a platform in November called Wander Create that helps customers and brands build their own fast casual restaurant. Users will pay $10 a month to launch the brand and make a share of revenue from orders. Lore thinks millions of users will opt into this program in the next 5 to 10 years. In the future, you won't even need to order your food. Your food will just show up breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Estimates predict wonder will do around $2 billion in revenue by the end of 2026, which is up 430% from 2023 when it pivoted from the food trucks.
I feel that the company is mature enough to be incredibly protected. On the downside, we have a model that's working really well in many different geographies, and it works well because it's incredibly diversified. Wander has several revenue streams, but the primary is selling its food through its own platform. By owning Grubhub, it controls about a fifth of the entire delivery Marcet with Blue Apron. It owns the third largest meal kit delivery service, but accounts for between 2.5% and 5% of that Marcet. About 70% of our orders come through our own app and platform, so we do have a direct relationship with consumers and have the ability to sell advertising on that platform as well.
It took competitor Chipotle nearly 30 years to reach a $40 billion valuation, although that is now closer to $36 billion. Lori expects wonder to cross that number by 2028. But wonders ambitions are risky, and they're expensive. The central food commissaries, local kitchens, delivery, logistics and technology are highly capital intensive. The company has also spent more than $1 billion on acquisitions. That's not including the deals where the amount wasn't disclosed. In July 2026, business news publication The Information reported that the company has been operating at a financial loss
since purchasing Grubhub and Blue Apron. Wanda declined to comment. The company sees its investments in automation as a hedge. It is capital intensive, but ultimately, if you're able to build a food infrastructure that's able to produce really high quality food at very affordable prices, and you're able to make that accessible to people in exurban and rural areas around the US. It's just a tremendous total addressable Marcet. But first and foremost, the concept has to fully prove itself. Customers have to like the product. Online reviews for Wonder's food remain mixed.
Cnbc tried several of Wonder's offerings salmon, a baked potato, beef, and a vegetarian wrap. It took about 30 minutes to get the food in store. Overall, this tastes pretty good. Yeah, I would get this again. This is a pretty solid meal. I was a little bit wary of the baked potato. Yeah that's good. It's cooked perfectly. It's pretty tasty. Come and try the food. I think you always have people online that have a bad food experience. You know, we had dozens of culinary engineers and food scientists working on how do you replicate even improve the quality of award
winning food with very limited equipment in a small space? Now we can cook a Bobby Flay steak to perfect temperature in six minutes, seared on both sides. Beautiful steak. That wasn't always the case. Investing in customer acquisition is one way to grow. But eight years out, wonder is still working on its brand recognition. Anecdotally, the company has done so in part by mailers, in-person fliers, and aggressive promotional pricing to attract first time customers. Wonder says it does very little discounting for existing customers.
They're making it easy and cheap for people to give wonder a try in hopes of showing them a good experience, and then they'll come back, whether that's working, I don't know. I think that wonder would say yes, but they have not provided a lot of details on sort of their financial performance. It remains to be seen how wonders Texas expansion can help it grow its customer base. It will also need to figure out how to get its clients to spend more than the current average of $30 per order. That tells us that most of Wonder's orders serve between 1 to 2 people, while its proposition is to make mealtime easier for
families and groups that want food from different restaurants. Then there's visibility. While it has purchased four physical restaurants, the other concepts on its platform aren't real, and building a following takes time. We do want each brand to stand on its own, and it's one of the reasons why we started to acquire iconic brands. We want people to have dinner at night and say, I just had a salt Hank's, or I just had a Bobby Flay steak. We don't want people to say, I had wonder tonight. So that's what I think makes the wonder business model really unique is that there's no capital cost to building and scaling restaurants across the platform.
